Tuesday, November 05, 2013

Some are wondering why Arne Duncan is taking eight members of his staff, along with translators and a security detachment to Haiti. Simple: Since 2010, long-time mentor and education reform loser, Paul Vallas, has been providing "expertise" in creating a national system of publicly funded schools in Haiti that will be privately run. And yes, to stay certified, schools must lock in to the new national curriculum and annual testing. This is the way that the Inter-American Development Bank described the new Vallas approach in 2010:

Along with financial support from the IDB and other
donors, the Haitian government will also receive technical assistance from
leading experts in education reform. One key advisor will be Paul Vallas, who
led the transformation of the New Orleans public schools system after Hurricane
Katrina.

Under the proposed reform, most Haitian schools would
become publicly funded but privately run institutions, foregoing tuition
charges. A central fund would be established for the government to pay salaries
of all teachers and school administrators participating in the new system.

In order to participate in the reformed system, schools
would have to undergo a certification process to verify the number of children
served and staff hired. As incentives to take part in the plan, schools would
receive financial support to upgrade their facilities as well as text books and
educational materials.

To remain certified, schools would have to meet increasingly
stringent standards, including the adoption of a national curriculum, teacher
training and facility improvement programs.

And what is Arne Duncan thinking about during his visit, where parents pray their children can go to school so that they may eat enough there that their stomachs will not distended? Arne is thinking about big data, don't you know:

In
an interview with The Associated Press, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan
said he believes that easier access to information can help improve education
standards in Haiti by letting people know more about student and teacher
enrollment and by letting them track student progress.

"One
of the many needs here are clear data systems, having transparency, knowing
basic things, like how many children we have, how many schools there are, how
many teachers we have," Duncan said. "I think it's so important that
everybody be transparent and honest on the good, the bad and the ugly."

Below is a story about the real Haiti and their education problems, written by Jesse Hagopian, who was in Haiti when the 2010 earthquake struck.

____________________

Jesse
Hagopian is a high
school teacher in the Seattle Public Schools and a founding member Social Equality Educators (SEE). In January
2010, he was in Haiti with his wife and 1-year-old son when the earthquake hit.
Here, he looks at the plans that school privatization enthusiasts in the U.S.
have for Haiti's devastated school system.

TWO DAYS before the earthquake, my 1-year-old son
and I accompanied my wife to Haiti for an HIV training course she was to
conduct. Two days after surviving the quake, we drove into the center of
Port-au-Prince from the Pétionville district, where we had been staying, and
passed a school that had completely collapsed.

I remember successfully convincing myself as we
drove by that not one student or teacher was struck by the chunks of drab-gray
cinderblock that lay scattered in the courtyard. As a Seattle Public Schools
teacher myself, I could not allow the image of being trapped with my students
under the debris of the school to enter my thoughts, and I managed to become
certain that no one had been in the building when it collapsed. After spending the
prior two days wrapping countless children's bloodied appendages with bed
sheets, I needed the peace of mind that these students lived.

But even teachers get the answers wrong. Upon
returning to Seattle and reviewing the statistics, it seems increasingly likely
that my confidence in the well-being of that school community was more coping
mechanism than fact.

The Haitian government estimates that at least 38,000
students and more than 1,300 teachers and other education personnel died in the
earthquake. As UNICEF
reported, "80 percent of schools west of Port-au-Prince were
destroyed or severely damaged in the earthquake, and 35 to 40 percent were
destroyed in the southeast. This means that as many as 5,000 schools were
destroyed and up to 2.9 million children here are being deprived of the right
to education."

The truth, however, is that the seismic activity
of free-market principles had shattered the education system in Haiti long
before January 12, 2010.

Some 90 percent of schools in Haiti are private
schools, and according to UN
statistics, primary school tuition can often represent 40 percent of
a poor family's income--forcing parents, at the very least, to choose which of
their children they'll send to school. Only about two-thirds of Haiti's kids
were enrolled in primary school before the earthquake, and less than a third
reach sixth grade.

Secondary schools enrolled only one in five
eligible-age children, which is one reason why the illiteracy rate in Haiti is
over half--57.24 percent. Poverty and lack of access to education has led to
mass child servitude, known as the
restavèk system, with an estimated 225,000 Haitian youth living in a
state of bondage.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

FOR MOST people, Haiti's broken school
system--now literally buried under tons of rubble--is an incomprehensible
horror. But for a few, the earthquake created a big break for business.

Vallas' legacy in these cities of privatizing
schools, reducing public accountability and undermining unions made him a
shoo-in to take charge of the Inter-American Development Bank's (IDB) education
initiative in Haiti.

To truly appreciate Vallas' epic dedication to
letting the free market rip Haitian society apart, you have to consider the
fact that he had to overcome a severe fear of flying to deliver the
laissez-faire gospel to Haiti.

Vallas' disaster-as-opportunity comment cited
above was clearly cribbed from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who
indirectly praised Vallas' work in New Orleans, saying, "I think the best
thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane
Katrina."

Duncan justified his statement by arguing that
the destruction of the storm allowed education reformers to start from scratch
and rebuild the school system better than before. However, as Naomi Klein,
author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, pointed
out about the New Orleans school system:

In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which
the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the
auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and
precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in
exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by
privately run charter schools...New Orleans teachers used to be represented by
a strong union; now, the union's contract had been shredded and its 4,700
members had all been fired.

It should be apparent, then, that with Vallas at
the helm of redesigning the Haitian school system, no child will be safe from
an off-the-Richter-scale neoliberal quake.

Vallas' scheme for Haitian education centers on
maintaining a system in which 90 percent of schools are private--with the one
modification that the Haitian government finance these private schools, based
on the charter school model he delivered to New Orleans.

To Vallas, education is a simple matter that
shouldn't be made more complicated by considerations about students being
multifaceted individuals with different learning styles, backgrounds and
passions. Vallas
summarized his educational philosophy at a May 2010 symposium on
schools in Haiti:

Education is not a complicated business: you
diversify the management models [read: move away from public management towards
private management], you expand your pool of qualified teachers, you develop
superior curricular instructional models with the training that goes with it,
you come up with basic classroom modernization designs that can be implemented
regardless of the condition of the facility, and you create a delivery system
to go and implement these things--and believe me this is not rocket science.

Given that the IDB's development strategy in
Haiti is dedicated to increasing
low-wage jobs in garment-production sweatshops, it shouldn't come as
a surprise that Vallas was hired to implement an education plan that seeks to
reduce schools to a "delivery system" assembly line, where the
purpose of education becomes the systematic and linear production of
widget-students.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE IDB's
proposed five-year, $4.2 billion plan for the remaking of the
Haitian education system could be described as the "Trojan school":
Using the promise of the day when there is reduced tuition in the bulk of
Haitian schools as a means to permanently enshrine a private schooling system
subsidized by the government. As the IDB explains of its proposal:

Under the reform, most Haitian schools will
become publicly funded institutions, foregoing or drastically reducing tuition
charges. The government will pay teacher salaries for schools participating in
the plan.

But here's the catch:

To remain in the new system, schools will have to
adopt a national education curriculum.

Eliminating tuition charges in Haiti is an
essential prerequisite to providing education to all of Haiti's children. Yet a
year and a half after the IDB introduced its plan, there has been little
progress in making schools free to all.

Moreover, a national standardized curriculum
established by powerful interests is likely to obscure important lessons for
Haiti's youngsters.

For example, will this national course-map,
financed by the IDB, examine how U.S. and Western foreign policy has, for
generations, destabilized the Haitian government--from Thomas Jefferson's refusal
to recognize the newly established Black republic at the turn of the 19th
century for fear that it would encourage slave rebellions in the American
South, through to the cables
uncovered by WikiLeaks revealing how the Obama administration
manipulated the recent presidential election in Haiti?

Is this uniform curriculum more likely to include
problem-posing lesson plans drawn from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the
Oppressed--or from the pre-packaged lessons that come shrink-wrapped with
former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's curriculum-narrowing
tests?

Vallas' advocacy of a "drill-and-test"
method for education should settle these questions, if there were ever any doubt.

While many politicians talk of international test
score comparisons, they rarely talk about what high-performing countries like
Finland, Singapore and Canada actually do: They ensure that all children have
housing, health care and food security. They fund their schools
equitably...They organize their curriculum around problem-solving and critical
thinking skills.

In this light, the struggle in Haiti for an
education that develops the whole child must be coupled with broader
struggles--for permanent housing for the hundreds of thousands still in tent
camps; for a sewage and water system to stem the spread of cholera; and for an
agricultural policy that supports Haitian farmers in domestic food production.

It would appear, however, that Vallas needs a
remedial class in fractions--because the world's governments, content with the
morality of lowest common denominator, have delivered only a small portion of
the money they pledged to help Haiti rebuild.

Since January 2010, the IDB has financed the
construction of 800 temporary classrooms in 57 school sites, and the
distribution of 100,000 backpacks with books and supplies for students. It has
also provided financial support to 1,200 schools, enabling some 70,000 children
to resume their lessons.

The IDB's boasts about temporary classrooms and
backpacks provide a powerful political science lesson for Haiti's youth: None
of the world's governments care enough to give anywhere near what the schools
need in aid.

The reporters discovered that the Clinton
Foundation provided Léogâne with trailers from Clayton Homes--the very company
being sued in the U.S. for providing the Federal Emergency Management Agency
with formaldehyde-tainted trailers following Hurricane Katrina.

As Macdonald and Doucet reported, the trailers
were to be used as classrooms--but they incubated mold rather than scholarship
and were plagued with disturbing levels of formaldehyde:

As Judith Seide, a student in Lubert's
sixth-grade class, explained to the Nation, she and her classmates
regularly suffer from painful headaches in their new Clinton Foundation
classroom. Every day, she said, her "head hurts, and I feel it spinning
and have to stop moving, otherwise I'd fall." Her vision goes dark, as is
the case with her classmate Judel, who sometimes can't open his eyes because,
said Seide, "he's allergic to the heat." Their teacher regularly
relocates the class outside into the shade of the trailer because the swelter
inside is insufferable.

Two out of four of these classrooms provided by
the Clinton Foundation couldn't be used to the end of the school year due to
temperatures frequently exceeding 100 degrees inside the trailers. As student
Mondialie Cineas said, "The class gets so hot. The kids get headaches. And
we go to the teacher for him to give us painkillers."

As it turns out, Vallas has been a strong
proponent--both in New Orleans and Haiti--of using trailers as classrooms,
arguing, "There are ways to create a classroom learning environment that
can be a superior learning environment, even if that classroom is in an
inadequate building." Given that Bill Clinton is a
close collaborator with the IDB, it's unsurprising that his model
for rebuilding schools in Haiti follows Vallas' lesson plan.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

HAITI AND New
Orleans have an inextricably linked history, including the 10,000
refugees that left Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) and arrived in New
Orleans in 1809, doubling the population of the city. They brought with them
the Creole culture and voodoo religion, elements of which persist in the bayou
to this day.

But the nature of the relationship between these
two cultures is currently being remade. From Paul Vallas and charter schools to
the Clayton Homes trailers, the U.S. is unmistakably attempting to export its
Hurricane Katrina response to Haiti and its schools--in a textbook case of
Naomi Klein's concept of the "shock doctrine" in which disaster
capitalists seek to profit from calamity.

When the shock doctrine is applied to schooling,
it has the effect of both profiteering off children and denying them access to
the knowledge that could help them escape subjugation. As the French colonial
governor of Martinique wrote to a French minister in Haiti in the late 1700s,
"The safety of the whites demands that we keep the Negroes in the most
profound ignorance. I have reached the stage of believing firmly that one must
treat the Negroes as one treats beasts."

Governments the world over owe a debt to Haiti
that is long past due--some from a history of direct colonial control or later
economic subjugation, and some from failing to honor pledges made in the
aftermath of the earthquake. If these debts were repaid, that would be the
basis for constructing a world-class education system.

The balance owed should be deposited directly
with the Haitian government to build a public school system accountable to the
country's citizens, not private interests. Haitian schools must be built
immediately, in permanent, earthquake-resistant, hurricane-safe, world-class
facilities that are free for all to attend. In this vision for the country's
public schools, they would serve as a focal point for Haitian society, where
clean water and free meals could be organized and distributed to families.

Finally, Haitian educators must be given the
autonomy to develop curricula that matches the needs of their students and the
world into which they will graduate--skills such as creativity, civic courage,
leadership, teamwork and social responsibility, which will be needed to address
the massive social challenges facing Haiti.

As anther school year approaches, I hope teachers
in trailers across Haiti are preparing lesson plans that engage students in a
critical dialogue about Toussaint L'Ouverture, his Haitian slave revolution
that overthrew Western colonialism, and the lessons it offers for the U.S.
governments' current neo-colonial control over the island nation today.

2 comments:

WOW! What an absolute goldmine for Pear$on--a NATIONAL, "'standardized'" curriculum--leading to, of course, "standardized" tests, these being designed, packaged & sold by none other than--Pear$on!! Just think of the headaches little Judith & Jedel will endure while poring over "standardized" tests composed of questions they would struggle to answer--because, certainly, as in the U.S., these questions will have NOTHING whatsoever to do with ANY experiences they have ever had in their lives.AND--just THINK of the $$$ that could be made by expansion of the charter chains Success Academy, Green Dot & White Hat! There goes all of Haiti's CARE money but---who cares?!Last but not least, let's let Michael Millken & K12 into Haiti's borders. The majority of those kids don't need teachers--heck, they've never HAD any! Therefore, roll in the computers & plug 'em in!